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Start with a sex-mad baroness and her frisky ménage à trois. Add in a stern German philosopher who fancied himself the next Friedrich Nietzsche, his mistress and a married couple who wanted a wholesome Swiss Family Robinson experience for their son. Throw them all together on one of the remotest spots on Earth and simmer until things come to a steamy boil. You couldn't make this stuff up, and, as a lively new documentary reports, you don't have to. "The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden" tells a humdinger of a story about wild doings on those celebrated islands off the coast of Ecuador. As directed by Danya Goldfine and Dan Geller, this captivating tale...

Related "Charles Darwin" Articles

Start with a sex-mad baroness and her frisky ménage à trois. Add in a stern German philosopher who fancied himself the next Friedrich Nietzsche, his mistress and a married couple who wanted a wholesome Swiss Family Robinson experience for...

Ever since Charles Darwin made his way to the Galapagos, we've heard a lot about that fateful moment when some previously water-bound creature pulled itself up from the slowly receding seas, took a breath and began the eons-long march to humanity.
What...

Things get small — really small — in this week’s episode of "Cosmos," which tackles the unseen universe at the atomic scale, from the teeming ecosystem inside a single dewdrop and the intricate machinery inside a plant’s cells, to the...

Why do our eyes open wide when we feel fear or narrow to slits when we express disgust? According to new research, it has to do with survival.
In a paper published Thursday in the journal Psychological Science, researchers concluded that expressions of...

Gerald Edelman, a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in 1972 who later joined the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla and wrote books and numerous articles about the brain, the nervous system and consciousness that amazed and sometimes annoyed his scientific...

It was just after a January storm in 1953, and the waves were epic.
With other adrenaline-addled young surfers, 16-year-old Ricky Grigg caravaned up the coast from Santa Monica to Rincon, just beyond Ventura. Racing with his board into the roar of...

Cavorting in the ocean with sociable seals is a stirring experience, and because of this, I don't know a traveler who doesn't have the Galápagos on his or her bucket list. Even though Charles Darwin's living laboratory is 600 miles from the nearest...

Sea turtles have it. So do salmon and Giant Burmese pythons. Pigeons are really famous for it. Now scientists report that some garden snails have a homing instinct too – but gardeners can overcome it with a simple heave-ho.
In a two-year experiment...

Today’s Google doodle celebrates the 215th birthday of Mary Anning, a 19th century fossil collector and paleontologist who, even as a poor working-class woman in a field dominated by wealthy upper-class men, helped shape the study of ancient extinct...

Colin Pillinger, a colorful British space scientist who sported thick mutton-chop whiskers and became a symbol of national pluck in masterminding a failed search for life on Mars, died Thursday in a Cambridge hospital. He was 70.
Pillinger collapsed in...

Using some plain old rubber strips, scientists have created a whole new shape -- a hemihelix, a long spiral that switches twisting directions over its length. The shape, described in the journal PLOS One, is rarely seen in nature – and could potentially...

The ways in which parking spaces devour a city, LACMA director Michael Govan's defense of his museum's architectural plans and one of the awesome-est documentaries about L.A. — finally released on DVD! Also: pit bulls, lots of pit bulls (but not...

Mr. G and Jellybean appeared on YouTube a little over a month ago and became viral-video stars. Footage of the reunion of the goat and the donkey -- viewed nearly 6 million times -- was a clear example, some said, of how animals experience emotions,...

Spider webs combine a strength and elasticity unmatched by anything we humans can make. They don't trigger much of an immune response in us and are "insoluble in water, two facts that the classical Greeks exploited when they used cobwebs to patch...

Here's evolution for you: Jane Austen may be set to replace Charles Darwin on the British £10 note.
That's according to the retiring governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, who has said that the author of "Pride and Prejudice"...

Barnes & Noble is getting out of the color tablet business (mostly). It announced Tuesday that it will cease production of its color Nook tablets -- although it plans to allow third parties to produce them, under pending licensing deals.
Could this...

Eight years ago, a New York journalist named Peter Braunstein, then 41, forced his way into the apartment of a 34-year-old Manhattan woman by pretending to be a firefighter. He proceeded to drug the woman, a former colleague, and sexually assault her...

The head of Turkey’s biggest publishing house is a 32-year-old, Istanbul-raised, Boston-educated sociologist with a smart nose for business and the good sense to steer clear of politics — until now.
Can Oz runs the publishing house Can Yayinlari and this...

With a charming, flawed heroine straight out of Jane Austen, a Dickensian rags-to-riches story and thwarted romances that hark back to the Brontës, Elizabeth Gilbert has taken cues from the greatest 19th century writers for her big 19th century-style...

How to enumerate the myriad wonders and delights of “Totem,” now taking its viewers on a dazzling trek from the primordial to the cosmic?
For starters, there’s Cirque du Soleil’s signature yellow-and-blue Grand Chapiteau, rising from the Port of Los...